Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Reinventing E-Mail, One Message at a Time

By Nick Bilton August 23, 2010 7:54 amAugust 23, 2010 7:54 am

My e-mail inbox is a dejected, endless morass. It’s a desolate wasteland of unanswered messages that continue to appear like a never ending game of Tetris. I can confidently say I hate my inbox and I know I’m not alone.

Hilary MasonHilary Mason, the lead scientist at Bitly.

Hilary Mason, the lead scientist at Bitly, a URL shortening company based in New York, felt the same way about her e-mail at one point, but being a scientist, she decided to fix the problem.

Ms. Mason has built layers on top of her Gmail account that follow a series of rules to correctly prioritize which e-mails she should read first. She calls the program the E-Mail Classifier and has given this little contraption the job of constantly reorganizing her messages like a magician shuffling a deck of cards.

“I think e-mail should be sorted by importance, not by time,” Ms. Mason explained to me in an interview.

So what happens when you send her an e-mail? Well, that depends entirely on who you are.

For example, the E-mail Classifier determines if you have e-mailed with Ms. Mason before. If you have, your message is pushed higher up a queue of other new messages. If you both correspond on a regular basis, you travel higher still.

But that’s only one aspect of the juggling act.

“The sender and subject line are actually the most important parts of an e-mail because people tend to put more important information in the subject,” she explained. “I’ve trained my classifier to understand this and try to determine the best action.”

Then there is a list of people who are essentially given carte blanche to appear at the top of her inbox regardless of the time of day or content of their messages.

“I had to rework the code a little in the beginning because my mother received an auto response message that said I would get back to her later,” Ms. Mason explained. “Now, whenever she e-mails me, it gets sent to my instant messenger program and my phone so I can reply immediately if necessary.”

Another aspect of categorizing e-mail, Ms. Mason explained, can be determined by the language in the message through what is known as “semantic analysis.” This works by analyzing the important words in a message.

Imagine you were to send an e-mail that said, “Hi Hilary, are you free to attend a dinner with Nick on Friday at 4Food in Midtown?” If Ms. Mason responds by saying “yes,” then anyone else who asks the same question with the words, Nick, dinner, Friday, 4Food or Midtown could automatically get a response that says, “Yes, I will be attending dinner on Friday.”

Finally, the system learns as more messages come in. “I’ve saved e-mail going back to 2003 and the classifier can look through these and determine who is more important from past correspondence or mail I’ve designated as important in the past,” she explained.

Right now the E-mail Classifier is only being used on Ms. Mason’s inbox, but she said she hopes to release the code used to analyze messages in the fall so others can reorganize their inboxes, too.